Monday, March 3, 2008

Hogarth defines non-anarchists as non-libertarian

Carl, are you saying that informed consenting adults should not be allowed to try medicines not approved by the federal government? Nobody is denying the possibility of deceit and asymmetric information in the pharmaceuticals market, but I don't see any need for government intervention other than to police fraud and perhaps protect an extremely limited form of patent rights. Why do you think that a combination of fraud case law and secondary markets (e.g. Consumer Reports) wouldn't eliminate the need for an FDA? You should check out http://www.fdareview.org/, a project of the brilliant libertarian economists Dan Klein and Alex Tabarrok.

Susan, you didn't answer my question about how Carl’s characterization of you terminating Medicare/Medicaid is “fear-mongering”. Thank you for in effect admitting you consider to be non-libertarian anyone isn't an anarchist. You earlier gave a contradictory but much more defensible definition that "a person is more or less libertarian according to the amount of aggression (including taxation) he advocates." I would counter that a person is more or less libertarian according to the aggregate amount of aggression that would be 1) conducted by the political structures she advocates and 2) enabled by the absence of the political structures she opposes.

In other words, I think libertarianism is more about opposing aggression than it is about abstaining from it. For example, I don't agree that it's optimally libertarian to give a green light to all aggression where the damage it causes is less than the cost to the victim of targeting, contesting, winning, and enforcing a tort claim against the aggressor -- assuming the victim is even able to bear those costs. Steve Kubby calls pollution taxes "the fox guarding the chicken coop", but his alternative is to declare open season on baby chicks if they're small enough.

We can debate the merits of taxing aggression all you want, but the larger point here is that you apparently admit you want to monopolize the label "libertarian" for only one of the various principled schools of libertarianism -- viz., anarchism. Since your Radical Caucus is devoted to "educating LP members about the Party's core principles", perhaps you could clarify if there are any positions regarding these 17 free variables in libertarian theory that also disqualify one from being a Hogarth-certified libertarian: http://libertarianmajority.net/free-variables-in-libertarian-theory.

Glen Rogers wrote

) The problem might be less a lack of focus and purpose but rather having marginal characters like Mr. Holtz, Mr. Capozzi and Miss Hogarth as your spokesmen is offensive to those constituencies most drawn to the small government message. (

Glen, please quote anything I've ever said that you think is "offensive to those constituencies most drawn to the small government message". Regarding "economic theory", I would love for you to point me to the places in "the collected works of Leonard Read" where he deals with developments like